


Cuddles in Disguise

by aphelant



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Cuddlefic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Podfic Available, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-03
Updated: 2011-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 01:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/207494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphelant/pseuds/aphelant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Woah, Little D.” Steph touches a finger to his tiny red nose, and he bats balefully at her hand. “What happened to your face?”</i>
</p><p><i>“What happened to </i>your<i> face?” he counters, then nearly coughs up a lung.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuddles in Disguise

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Cuddles in Disguise (podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3475) by Pennyplainknits. 



> This was written for Pennyplainknits to record as a podfic. If you are able, the audio version is the recommended consumption method.

Steph rolls her shoulder for the third time in the last five uncomfortable minutes. "Stupid computer," she mutters. The words echo back at her from all corners of the cave.

Filling out reports for Batman post-patrol is not a typical occurrence. But getting a request for help from the Big B himself isn't exactly typical, either.

"B to B.G.," Dick's voice had said in her ear, and, "need you to cover the shipyard tonight, if you're not otherwise occupied."

She *had* been occupied -- with a handsy pimp whose wrist she'd maybe broken a little bit, and then she was going to help out his roughed up, skittish girls -- but she had time to swing by the docks later. However...

"Uh, that's Robin's territory, I don't think he'll like it much if I --"

"He's indisposed. You have the all-clear, if you can manage it."

She knew Dick hadn’t meant it like **that** , but she’d bristled at the wording. "Yeah. I've got it."

"Thanks, B out."

So, fine. She swept the docks, followed some sketchy guys to a warehouse, got a bit of intel on a possible drug shipment -- Or maybe it really was a 2 a.m. arrival of Twinkies. Street names are weird, and sometimes hilarious, so it was hard to tell. -- and now she was writing a _report_.

She never has to make reports for Oracle. Or Proxy. Or _whomever_. But Batman likes everything filled out and tagged and encoded and copied in triplicate like the paranoid guy she knows and loves, so here she is at quarter to dawn, hunched over the Batcomputer, pretending her shoulder isn't twinging like fuck.

At least it's Saturday, so not only does she not have class in four hours (thank god), but her mom's on night shift so she can get home whenever she wants without having to sneak around about it.

Steph rolls her shoulder again, irritated at the flare of pain the movement produces. Shooting a de-cel line to catch herself mid-fall was better than hitting the pavement (and on a twenty storey drop, it would be less 'hitting' and more 'splatting', really), but it had still done some damage. "Just two more fields," she reassures herself and pushes through the last of the file.

Finally finished [“...unless ‘Twinkies’ is not actually a codeword for anything other than food. In which case please ignore! ;)”] she stands and stretches. Her spine pops in relief and her legs ache in a good, used way, but she tests her shoulder with her fingers and it feels warm. She thinks about how long it will take to get home, and how much worse it will be if she waits that long to treat it, and decides that since there’s no rush to get home she can get an icepack from the freezer and watch some television just as comfortably here as at home.

Actually, even *more* comfortably -- the television here is bigger and has a better selection of channels, and Alfred usually has some kind of snacks made on the weekends when people are going to be around. It would be practically rude not to eat them. Especially if they contain chocolate.

She carefully strips out of her costume and into some comfort wear (a tank top and pair of flannel pyjama pants she has stashed in a locker for situations just like this) and makes her way upstairs. The kitchen floor is cold on her bare feet and she rues not digging her socks out of her backpack, but her feet will be tucked up under her soon enough so she doesn’t bother going back for them.

The ice pack she pulls from the freezer is almost too cold to touch. One of the kitchen drawers contains tea towels, she’s sure of it, but after opening three and not finding any she just grabs the one that’s already out for use. It’s probably not that dirty, but even if it is, at this point she’s too tired to care.

She wraps the ice pack in the towel, pours herself a glass of milk, and balances them and her plate of cookies -- both chocolate chunk _and_ laid out in an s shape, so they're definitely **her** cookies -- between her hands.

She can hear the television as she approaches the living room, and when she gets to the door she finds an empty room and one of those early morning yoga shows on the screen. Someone -- probably Dick -- must have forgotten that the tv was on when they went to bed this morning. For a family so focused on saving the world, they seem to be pretty good at wasting electricity.

Careful not to jostle her precariously balanced cargo, Steph leaps over the back of the couch and lands on --

“Hurrgh!”

\-- _not_ on the cushions, oh god cookies _everywhere_. Through some miracle of fate she manages to not spill a drop of milk, and hastily slides her glass and the ice pack onto the coffee table so she can snatch up all the felled cookies. Luckily she has quick hands, and she picks up, blows off, and replaces all of the cookies onto her plate before the five-second rule can render any of them uneatable.

“You almost ruptured my spleen, Fatgirl! Maybe you should eat some broccoli instead of those cookies.”

Oh, geez, just what she didn’t want tonight. “Don’t make me sic Kara on you. _Again_ ,” she growls out, and throws Damian a glare over her shoulder. It doesn’t last long, though, once she sees the half-hearted menace of his frown, peeking out from under a pile of blankets.

“Woah, Little D.” Steph touches a finger to his tiny red nose, and he bats balefully at her hand. “What happened to your face?”

“What happened to _your_ face?” he counters, then nearly coughs up a lung. Steph laughs incredulously and hunkers down on the opposite end of the couch, shifting so the ice pack is sandwiched between her shoulder and the couch back. She eyes him critically while munching on a cookie. Damn, but it tastes good.

“That insult wasn’t up to your usual standards,” she observes aloud, and he shrugs indifferently. After a couple minutes of silence, interrupted occasionally by quiet instructions from the television about lunging and downward dog and warrior two, Steph asks, “So, is it the flu, or what?”

Damian’s lip curls up. “How should _I_ know?” he grunts.

“What?” she says, then remembers one particularly obnoxious evening when he’d pointed out all the ways in which he was a superior human specimen, a list which included that he was somehow less susceptible to contagious diseases, or something. Honestly, after five minutes she’d largely tuned him out. It had been the only way to keep from pushing him off a rooftop.

“Wait, are you saying you’ve never been sick before?”

His hands fist in the blanket. “It was a perk of being an al Ghul, apparently,” he bites out, “which I lost when mother disinherited me. Maybe -- I think she was dosing me with something. But I don’t really know.”

Damian definitely looks agitated now, like he’s itching for a fight but doesn’t really know where to direct his anger, and possibly can’t even summon up the energy for one, anyway. Poor kid.

“Well,” Steph says, trying to refocus Damian’s attention on something other than his abandonment issues, “at least you’ve got Alfred to nurse you back to health. I hear it’s a special talent of his.”

“I guess. Pennyworth did bring me soup.” He looks thoughtful and adds, “It wasn’t terrible.”

“That’s practically a glowing commendation, coming from you.” Damian’s mouth twitches into what could almost pass for a smile. But then he frowns, winces, and pulls a handful of Kleenex from somewhere under the blanket and blows his nose. A lot.

She can feel her face tightening up with concern so she consciously relaxes it. Obviously, the merest hint of sympathy will set Damian off on one of his supercilious rants. Except he looks so tiny tucked into the corner of the couch with his afghan and his red nose and his flush of sickness that Steph can't resist wanting to help, regardless of the fact that he insulted her not five minutes ago.

When Steph was a kid, she used to lay her head on her mom's lap when she was sick. Sometimes they would watch tv or a movie, and sometimes her mom would read to her, but always there was a hand in her hair stroking her head. The few times Tim had taken care of her when she was sick just weren't the same as the easy relaxation that her mom created with a well-placed cuddle. She never asked him to hold her and rub her head, but she always wanted it.

Damian, who has definitely lacked in hugs growing up, surely doesn't even know what being comforted is. He's not using three-ply Kleenex, for one, and for another, he's a freaking ten year old kid stoically sleeping on the couch, alone, the first time he's sick.

The lonely little shit is getting comforted if it's the last thing she does. Which it very well might be if he catches on.

"I have a solution," she announces.

He eyes her in a bleary, suspicious way. "I don't like the sound of that," he says.

Steph grins in a way she hopes is winning rather than crazy. "My mom taught me a way to beat a cold faster. You put your head on a healthy person's lap, and you like, heal by osmosis."

"What," he says, narrowing his eyes. "That's not even scientific."

"My mom's a doctor, Little D. It totally works, I've kicked lots of colds that way."

Damian looks non-plussed. "So I put my head on a healthy person's lap --"

"For instance: mine!"

"-- and that cures me."

Steph nods enthusiastically. "Yep!"

“But isn't that...cuddling?”

Damian’s nose wrinkles in disgust, and a large part of her wants to say, “Actually, _pity_ cuddling,” but she shoves that mean, inner-Steph voice down and replies with, “Tactical comfort, with bonus medicine.”

“Hm,” he says, sounding intrigued despite the sour expression on his face. “You’re _certain_ it isn’t cuddling?”

“Absolutely. It's science!” she lies. “Now get over here before I change my mind.”

Damian heaves a put-upon sigh but wriggles his way over to her. She stuffs the last cookie in her mouth and puts her empty plate and glass on the table. The ice pack gets shoved under a cushion before she puts his pillow in her lap and guides his fevered head against her thigh.

He doesn't wriggle at all, like she expects, but she feels him relaxing incrementally as time wears on and the universe doesn't implode. When it seems like he's as comfortable as he's going to get she places a tentative hand on his shoulder.

"Is it working yet?" she asks, and prays that he never, ever finds out that she made this whole thing up. She likes her arms just where they are, thank you very much.

He makes an annoyed grumbly noise and says something that sounds like, "Shut up, I'm trying to sleep," and once she's sure he's not drifting (or faking) she touches her cooler hands to his forehead and neck where it's sickly damp and hopes that it's some kind of relief.

Steph flips stations until she finds one with retro cartoons and watches it for a while. She has no idea how many terribly animated episodes there are before she notices a presence at her back which she really hopes is new.

"He hasn't been sleeping long," she whispers. Dick comes around the far side of the couch in a pair of sweats and bare feet. On any other day she might have taken more notice and maybe even flirted a bit, but this morning she has a lap full of over-warm boy and Dick looks like she kicked his puppy. Or, in this case, cuddled his Robin.

"I told him this would cure him by osmosis," Steph tells him. Dick's unconsciously forlorn expression breaks and he smiles at her -- them -- fondly.

"So he has a fever, huh," he says, and Steph smiles back.

"A little bit. I'm hoping he won't remember this when he wakes up."

"Don't worry, I'm sure he'll be too sick to hurt you _that_ much," Dick says. He perches on the arm of the couch and would look nonchalant if it were not for the way his eyes keep straying to where Damian's feet poke out from the end of the blanket.

"Transformers is next," Steph tells him, and she can see that he battles with himself for a moment before lifting Damian's feet and sliding onto the couch beneath them, all in one silent movement that she doesn't even feel. He casually stretches one arm out along the back of the couch and uses the other to cover Damian's toes with first the blanket and then his hand.

Steph turns back to the television and they watch cartoons together in companionable silence while Damian sleeps, Steph strokes his head, and Dick keeps his feet safe and warm. Around them, the room lightens as the morning breaks bright and new, the sound and smell of breakfast wafts in, and Optimus Prime leads the Autobots to win the day.

**Author's Note:**

> Penny had asked for Steph and Damian at the grocery store, but this is what came out instead. My Damian is softer and more kid-like than in canon, probably because I love him to death, and I like him better my way. Nightwing!Dick&Robin!Damian is my crime-fighting OTP. I am not ashamed to be a future!Steph/Damian fan.


End file.
